January 2010
29 posts
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On Multitasking
poeks:
[good stuff woefully excised] But what is multitasking, really, and why does the iPhone model seem different? I mean, with some exceptions (for example, listening to music while you surf the web), you’re not really doing two things at once. In most cases you are actually doing two things sequentially, say, writing a term paper in iWork and looking up sources in Safari, not writing a term...
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Jason Permenter: We should have just gotten one pot. I'm so stupid.
Tea shop waitress: Yeah.
Here's the thing
biorhythmist:
Let’s say I have a tumblr draft that I’ve spent a little time on. ;)
And let’s say I’m finally happy with this draft, what with it having all the proper emoticons and hyperbole, so I decide to publish it. :)
And then let’s say that An Error Has Occurred when I try to publish this draft. I get that. Shit happens from time to time when you are trying to maintain a live blogging...
Five Seconds Hate
(In the car, I put on “Up with People” by Lambchop for my wife to hear. Several minutes pass. Suddenly, she points at the dashboard.)
Wife: I wonder how this is made. Me: Really? Do you? Wife: Yes, I think the pattern is interesting. Me: No no, it’s lovely. It’s just that I put on a song that takes six minutes to build up to the good part, I think we’re both...
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Corner Case
In a great post called Always On, Adam Lisagor wrote about a subtle feature of the built-in iPhone camera app that makes your photos less blurry. It was a perfect I-see-what-you-did-there: a rare example of designers and engineers refusing to take the easy way out when clearly they could have gotten away with it. In the same spirit, I decided to write about something that impressed me in the...
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Things Not to Type into Google Images
Scleral tattoo.
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Family Planning
Wife: How far apart do you think we should have our kids?
Me: At least six feet at all times.
dwineman asked: How can you keep from mixing up my pronouns when I talk to yourself?
“Brian Stableford notes in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd ed.) that...”
– Wikipedia: Shaggy God Story
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Seriously though, no one noticed that the memory and logic modules Dave Bowman removes when he’s deactivating HAL are the same shape and proportions* as the monolith?
*1:4:9 to infinite precision, as described in the novel, and also (in the novel) capable of becoming transparent, which makes the resemblance to these Lucite-or-something slabs even stronger.
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STOP SAYING THE DECADE DIDN’T START YET
Listen. There are people who will tell you that “the decade” (whatever that means) doesn’t start until 2011. There are thousands of reasons to ignore these people, but here’s the best one: they’re wrong.
A decade is an arbitrary span of 10 years. You can distinguish one such span from another by any identifying feature you choose. For example, the decade called...
